In the game: Hershey Bears doctor fixes bumps and bruises

This is one of four in a series on team athletic trainers and doctors. The rest of the series will be posted here throughout the week.

They keep the athletes in tape, in shape and ready to roll in central Pennsylvania. Team doctors and athletic trainers for the professional baseball, indoor football, soccer and hockey teams all share a love of sports and a commitment to being a team player, and feel fortunate to help the athletes perform. Fans might not notice them until a player gets hurt but it’s their long, irregular hours behind the scenes that keep the teams on their feet.

Fixing bumped, broken and bruised body parts is a common occurrence for an ice hockey team’s doctor.

“There’s no part of their anatomy that is not susceptible to injury,” said Dr. Kevin Black, one of two team doctors for the Hershey Bears. “I don’t know that there’s a typical injury. You kind of go from your head to your ankle.”

Black should know. He’s attended nearly 40 games a season since 1993, plus a training room visit the morning of a game and a midweek check. Even his three now-adult children have spent Saturdays in the training room with Dad.

“My wedding vows didn’t say that I’m going to go to 40 hockey games for the next 20 years,” he laughed, “but my wife has been unbelievably supportive, allowing me to do what I love to do professionally.”

“Because you see the players so often, you tend to develop a closer relationship with them, but you do have to walk that line between being a doctor and not being their buddy,” he said.

“I was just shocked,” he recalled. “My next thought is, ‘What is the best way to share this with this young athlete who has no family support systems locally?’

“It’s not something an orthopedic physician typically does,” he added. “For me it was very difficult to share that information.”

Dupre returned to Montreal for treatment and died in 1997 at age 24 after a 16-month battle.

“Relative to that, many of the other intervention discussions I have to have seem minor,” Black mused.

Although Black was a multisport athlete in high school and college who underwent four knee operations by age 19, they weren’t the impetus for his career. He had planned to be a heart surgeon until a fourth-year orthopedic rotation opened his eyes to the excitement of working with athletes and new developments in arthroscopic surgery.

“I can’t say I’m happy to have had the knee surgeries,” he said. “They weren’t great operations in those days, but it does allow me to have a perspective in dealing with athletes that other people might not necessarily have.”